Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘This book has revealed a distinct change in the lives of never-married women at the end of the seventeenth century. Demographers long ago found that numbers of lifelong singlewomen were at their highest level of the early modern period in the later part of that century. And this study has shown that urban singlewomen were increasingly active in trade, property holding, and moneylending by the end of the 1600s.’

It took me a while but now I am really enjoying this audiobook. It makes me want to learn more about the beguines and their order, I have never heard of them before.

‘The Reformation led to a distinctly more negative view of singleness. Before the dissolution of the monasteries Englishwomen had a religious alternative to lay marriage: they could dedicate their lives to the Church. Nevertheless, contemporaries viewed nuns not so much as singlewomen but as brides of Christ... After the Reformation the option of being a nun was legally closed off to Englishwomen’

‘The crusades, however, never threatened more than the edges of the Islamic world; the damage they did to Byzantium was considerably more serious. The empire’s dependence upon its capital city, Constantinople, made it peculiarly vulnerable, and from the time of the Second Crusade onwards it was again and again confronted with the prospect of extinction at the hands of the crusaders.’

‘It is striking how common it was for urban singlewomen to hold property. The wills of never-married women who lived in the provincial towns of Southampton, Bristol, Oxford and York in the early modern period illustrate this. In Southampton, 44.7 per cent (seventeen out of thirty-eight) of single female testators between the years 1550 and 1750 bequeathed real property.’

‘as-Salih had made an alliance with the Khwarismian troops who had been soldiering in Mesopotamia ever since their defeat by the Mongols and who were ready to service any lord who could pay them. Moving down from the north they swept through the Holy Land and occupied Jerusalem without meeting any resistance worth mentioning. This time Jerusalem had been lost for good.’

‘Innocent III had completely ignored the crusading vow sworn by Frederick II in 1215; the king’s participation would not have fitted in with his conception of a papal crusade. Likewise at first Honorius III also made no attempt to persuade Frederick to fulfil his vow; in any event until 1218 the latter was far too busy with the fight against his rival Otto IV to be able to give any thought to a crusade.’

‘Although the outcome of the Fourth Crusade might have been expected to produce a cooling-off in enthusiasm for the crusade in Europe during the period of the establishment of the Frankish states in Greece, no such development in fact occurred. On the contrary the precedent of a crusade against Christians was followed by a period of considerable crusading activity within Europe itself.’

‘In 1199, after the first date set for the mustering of an army had come and gone with nothing achieved, the pope, while still continuing with his unremitting preaching of the crusade, tried to help the cause by decreeing a crusading tax of one fortieth on clerical incomes... None the less success now attended his efforts. In November 1199 the first contingents gathered at a tournament in Champagne.’

‘It could be argued that service was not so much a particular job description as a stage of life in early modern England. In England, as opposed to southern European countries such as Italy, domestic service was seen as an occupation for young people in their teens and twenties. It was something one did before marrying and establishing a household and (ideally) becoming one’s own master’

‘A real change of heart came only after the catastrophic defeat at Hattin in the summer of 1187. Urban III died under the impact of the news. His successor, Gregory VIII, although he was pope for no more than two months, gave decisive momentum to the preaching of the crusade. His crusading encyclical, Audita tremendi, issued on 29 October 1187 is a moving document and a masterpiece of papal rhetoric‘

‘Many knights were killed in the battle. The rest were captured, among them the king, the Master of the Temple and Reynald of Châtillon. Reynald’s head was struck off by Saladin himself. The Templars too were executed; only their Master was spared. The precious relic of the True Cross... was lost again and this time for ever.’

‘The division of Zengi’s lands in 1146 whereby Saif ed-Din Ghazi obtained Mosul and Nur ed-Din (1146-74) Aleppo was unfortunate for the Franks. It meant that Nur ed-Din was freed from the responsibility for the disorders in the east which had weighed so heavily upon his father. He could concentrate on the struggle against Damascus and the Franks.’

‘The bonds between mothers and their never-married daughters were particularly strong. Adult singlewomen often remained at home with a parent, who was more commonly a widowed mother than father... If a singlewoman predeceased her mother, she frequently relied on her maternal parent to execute her will and named her as a primary heir.’

‘Paradoxically, civic officials required singlewomen to work and support themselves, but at the same time they limited these women’s employment options and channeled them into less remunerative and less autonomous occupations, thus giving never-married women little control over their work or the length of their employment.‘

‘One option for a never-married woman like Shrimpton was to find work in the informal and casual trades such as victualling and huckstering that employed so many wives and widows. But even in these occupations never-married women were treated differently from their ever-married sisters. Widows made up the majority of women working as tipplers and alehouse-keepers’

‘After some debate the assembly made the incredibly stupid decision to attack Damascus. After 1146 there could be no question of Edessa being a war objective and in view of the absence of the north Syrians the case for Aleppo rather went by default. But Damascus was the last place to attack. The existence of the kingdom depended on the continuation of the alliance made with Damascus against Aleppo‘

‘The news of the fall of Edessa caused a considerable stir in the West, but though it saddened men it did not immediately spur them on to a spontaneous crusade. A Frankish embassy led by Bishop Hugh of Jabala arrived at the papal curia at Viterbo... Eugenius listened receptively to their pleas and on 1 December 1145 he issued the first crusading bull’

‘One of the most important events of Baldwin II’s reign was the foundation of the Military Orders. A knight from Champagne, Hugh of Payens (d. 1136) was apparently the first to have the idea that it might be pleasing to God if a monk’s way of life was combined with fighting against the heathen so as to create a new knightly ideal... Thus they became known as the Templars.’

‘Early in September 1099 most of the crusaders left Jerusalem. Robert of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, Baldwin of Le Bourg, and Raymond of Toulouse marched north with their troops; the two Roberts were on their way home. Only Godfrey de Bouillon and Tancred remained in Jerusalem. With them were only some 300 knights and 2,000 foot soldiers.’

‘During their march through Asia Minor and even more during the coming struggle in Syria and Palestine, the crusaders profited from the state of disarray in Islam. Since the Muslims were unable to grasp what was about to hit them, they saw no reason to abandon their own internal feuds. Medieval Arabic, like medieval Latin, developed no word for ‘crusade’.’

‘When Southampton’s officials failed to compel independent singlewomen back into household dependency, they forced the women to leave the town. In 1609, for example, they told the charmaid Elizabeth Green to put herself into service within two weeks or to depart from Southampton. In this manner, Southampton’s assembly prosecuted fourteen charmaids between 1607 and 1608’

‘Singlewomen and widows had very different residential options available to them. For one thing, widows had more alternatives from which to choose. The dominance of the nuclear family and household in early modern England meant that once a husband died, his widow did not return to her natal family or go to live with her husband’s family. Instead, she became the head of her deceased husband’s household.’

‘between 1600 and 1750 the average Englishwoman did not marry until age 26, and men waited even longer to marry, or until age 28. Since England’s population was quite youthful in this period this means that a large proportion of its people were single. Moreover, it has been suggested that anywhere from 13 to 27 per cent of persons born between the years 1575 and 1700 remained single’

‘At Clermont words were chosen with precision and all that was actually offered was the full remission of the earthly penances imposed by the Church. Preachers then went out and preached something else, the remissio peccatorum which literally means the remission of sins and in theology refers to the remission of the temporal penalties due to sin’

‘Originally the object of the crusade was to help the Christian Churches in the East. However unnecessary such help may, in fact, have been, it was in these terms that Urban is supposed to have spoken at Clermont. But very soon men had a more definite object in mind: to free the Holy Land and, above all, Jerusalem, the Sepulchre of Christ, from the yoke of heathen dominion.’

‘cannot be proved that the Turks actually did oppress the Christians in the East, as western sources, among them the speech attributed to Urban II at Clermont, maintained. In the conquered districts the native Christians were treated just as they always had been by the Muslims - as a subject minority population who paid taxes but who enjoyed the protection of Islamic law and a certain measure of freedom of worship.’

‘In 1600, European agricultural productivity was not much different than it had been two centuries earlier: about five bushels of grain per bushel sown in fertile areas, roughly one-tenth of the average yield today. Yields were even lower on poor soil or during the all too frequent droughts, late frosts, or heavy rains.‘

‘Because so many records have been lost or destroyed, it is difficult to make an estimate for all of Europe, but most scholars agree that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were officially tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. Between 75 and 85 of these were women, though the gender balance varies widely‘

‘It was Charles who had chosen to fight at Culloden, Charles whose stubborn, shortsighted autocracy had defied the advice of his own generals and gone to invade England. And whether Sandringham had meant his offer for good or ill, it had died with him. There was no support from the south; such English Jacobites as there were did not rally as expected to the banner of their king.’